


Conclusion of the Imperial Planetologist

by Dien



Category: Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2013-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-27 00:12:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/971951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A character examination of Liet Kynes. Originally written for Yuletide 2008.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conclusion of the Imperial Planetologist

In the moment of his father's death, he is riding; on top of the world, on top of the desert, the hot wind in his face, hooks in his hands.

At nineteen years old, he is his father's son: a scientist, a person of pragmatism, logic, reason. While he knows the prophecies as one who has been raised to them-- he is his mother's son as well-- he views them from the vantage point of one standing, ultimately, outside the sietch. Through the strange distorting lens of social science, anthropology, ethnocultural study, and academic skepticism.

He is a scientist.

And yet, in the moment that the cave collapses, raining down rock death on his father and the other Fremen with him, Liet Kynes feels a pang of cold shoot through him, numb his fingers on the maker hooks. To be cold, under Arrakis' midday sun: science has no explanation for this.

He shakes off the cold, and turns his attention to the calls of the worm-steersman. His life, after all, is a sequence of such contradictions. By the time they return to sietch, and by the time a bat brings distrans notice of the cave-in and the dead, he has quite forgotten the incident.

***

Contradictions. The scientist among the savages, save that the savages were his mother and brothers and wife and daughter, his _people_. (And also the people his father used, dispassionately, in his great Project, in the terraforming of an entire world.... the people he himself continued to use.)

Liet Kynes grew to manhood as one of the Fremen. He viewed his father's charts and schematics with eyes as blue as any son of the deep desert, bluer than his father's had ever grown to be. He rode shai-halud at twelve, and slew his first Harkonnen before that. In the eyes of the people he was one of them, and furthermore a prophet among them, the son of the umma, umma himself. Keeper of sacred knowledge! _Ibn qirtaiba!_

But he was conscious of the gulf between himself and his people even as a boy, and grew more conscious of it as he grew older. He was to be Pardot's successor. Imperial Planetologist to the Padishah Emperor, for this world of spice and sand.

He was conscious that Dune, for all her spice, was but one world of a million. He was conscious of the interweave of politics and planets that existed where his Fremen kin saw only a starry sky.

 _The Fremen are desert creatures, just as is the scorpion, the kangaroo rat, the modified Arrakeen vulture_ \-- his father said, to the boy Liet, gesturing with enthusiasm at the projected images of each biological specimen. _They are adapted utterly! They are optimal survivors for this ecotype!_ On and on the praise, for the Fremen ingenuity and savagery, in the same tones as Pardot also praised the blood-drinking adaptation of the vulture.

Thus, buried in the lectures the subtle coding, Pardot Kynes' unconscious arrogance: _you are not one of them, Son. They are specimens-- we are scientists._

So the boy learned that the rock-deep beliefs of his mother's people were not _truth_ but merely "culture", a term with no real distinction, for Kynes-the-elder, from the plant and bacterium cultures grown in his biological experiments. "The culture is of use as it provides a hospitable growth environment."

Any lingering doubts disappeared with his father's death. The message was received by the Imperium that Pardot Kynes was dead; the forms were checked, and seen to have been observed by the father; all was in order; the message returned to Arrakis that His Majesty saw fit to grant the young Liet Kynes scientific dispensation over this land.

There was pride in that, to a man nineteen years of age-- a pride of manliness that he knew his water-brothers would find wholly foreign, wholly freakish. How, then, could one be proud that a man so far away as to be merely a speck of light in the sky-- a man one had never met, never fought side by side with, never known the measure of-- that the man had written words saying that one was a servant, a lackey? It would have defied comprehension, to the Fremen mind.

So he did not speak of it, to them, and because the only souls worth speaking to on Arrakis were Fremen he did not speak of it at all. He was Imperial Planetologist, steward of the sand, the worms, the birds, the Fremen. The desert creatures.

Not one of them, but their minder.

...still, he did slaughter five Harkonnen dogs by hand the night he became Imperial Planetologist, and did it not for the Padishah Emperor, but because his father was dead, and shedding blood is the Fremen way to cry.

***

"Ahead," Stil says in the Chakobsa tongue, his eyes glinting in the light of Dune's second moon, the Fist.

Stil's eyes are sharper, so Liet does not debate the call, instead testing the heft of the crysknife in his hand. It is a new blade, and as yet unwatered; the first he himself has made, from tooth to weapon.

Stil had come to him in Carthag, where he would have not normally gone, but a water-brother's need is a water-brother's need. Liet himself would not have been in the city, the Beast Rabban's squalid absurd city, if not that he had had to formally receive Shaddam's seal and crest. This had required him to allow a Harkonnen lackey to physically touch him, during the presentation ceremony, and that still rankles like sour water.

But Stil had come after dark had fallen, bringing him the knife that he had left back at the sietch, and Stil had known exactly what was necessary to shake him from the shadows.

So that is why two youths, one savage and one scientist, are slipping through the shadows of the pre-fabbed plas-buildings of Carthag on this night, hungry for blood. Liet sneers at the buildings-- fools, they know nothing of the dust, they know nothing of the grit, within six months the walls of these newest buildings will be so pitted and scarred that the Harkonnen capitol will look as though a shields-and-las battle had taken place here. Their oppressors are idiots. (This rankles his youthful pride also: it is one thing to be shackled, but to be shackled by _fools...!_ How can they hope to rule a world they do not even attempt to comprehend?)

The Harkonnen dogs come closer, a patrol of two, shields flickering in the night air. Really, it is almost insulting. Liet claims the one on the right, Stil the one on the left, and they have them down and dead in less seconds than it takes to tell.

They leave the bodies where they lay. The elders call it foolish waste on their part, but Liet and Stil and several of their peers disdain any reclamation of Harkonnen water. It was Stil who'd said it, a vulpine grin splitting his patchy beard: "Who wants to taste Harkonnen on their lips?"

The night goes well. Anything in Harkonnen colors that crosses their path is left to bleed out. Stil, drunk on their own bravado, goes so far as to suggest that perhaps they should take Rabban, slumbering in his own filth somewhere in the palace core, but Liet remembers that he is now Imperial Planetologist, loyal subject. There are lines. He points out Rabban is heavily guarded, that there will be surveillance devices, that they might even be taken alive.

"Ah, this is what I need you for, Liet," Stil grins at him, as they head back towards the dusty offices that house the official ecological staff: himself. "You are the smart one."

Yes. Yes he is. The scientist.

He stops in the middle of the dusty street, stricken with an awareness so clear that it could perhaps be revealed truth after all: the chasm that divides him and his water-brother can no longer be bridged by youthful hijinks, by the savage joy of the fight. Tonight was for his father's remembrance, yes, but it was also a farewell, because there will be no more nights like this. He has work to do, the work of the world, and Stil is... only a part of that work, a tool to be wielded, he sees, in the unification of the sietches under strong leadership. Nothing more.

Stil turns his head back to look at him, and he makes his feet move again, stepping through the dust of the land which is now less a home, and more a burden.

***

Over twenty years he carried Arrakis. _Liet_ , his Fremen whispered of him in reverent tones, and from pan to graben his word was law. His was the will that drove the greening of Dune, his the blue-within-blue eyes that saw the projection of all the biological charts. Let the Harkonnens think they owned this planet, when every order they gave had to be punctuated with a whip's tip to even hope for obedience!

_Arrakis has its own way of determining who wears the mantle of authority._

He took a wife from among his Fremen, of course, and she bore not the son he had expected but a daughter. No matter; he taught her, as he taught them all, repeating and reinforcing his father's great plan.

At nights, Liet Kynes looked up from Dune to the sky, and wondered at the worlds upon worlds that glittered in the void like granulated quartz. A thousand upon a thousand, each teeming with life: all easier subjects than Arrakis. He would never see them. Spice shackled the known universe to Dune, and spice shackled him here as well, the concentration such in any native's diet that to transplant them would be a death sentence.

At such times Liet Kynes ached with the knowledge of the worlds he would never walk. Never to see the oceans of Caladan, the snow-topped mountains of Gezeth IV, the endlessly-studied fossil strata of Aemon.

 _I am a scientist! How can I be denied these sights?_ he would say to the night air, so mockingly dry. The desert wind whispered that Arrakis would not see green for another three hundred years, assuming of course that one of his successors did not destroy the entire careful chain that had been built, and must now be carefully extended, inch by inch, over the sand. It could all be blown away by one sandstorm. His life's work, at the mercy of this hellish rock that his father had embraced as a fascinating problem, uncaring that he was chaining his children and children's children to the solution, for generations to come.

The years passed. Liet Kynes ruled the shadow Arrakis while the Harkonnens pretended they controlled the daylight one, and so it went. He knew more than any man living of Dune-- not merely her rocks and her cartographies, but her heart, her moods, her furies. He could have given them the planet.

But the Harkonnens did not ask him for education, and he disdained to give it.

***

And it is, of course, the Harkonnens who kill him in the end, via their Sardaukar hands.

Dying in the desert. Dying a death monumentally insulting, as rankling as Harkonnen touch had been twenty-five years before. Dying the death of an ignorant, like some off-worlder who wouldn't know not to go into the desert without a stillsuit!

The Harkonnens do not claim his body for water. The Harkonnen thugs leave him to die. Thus they pay him neatly back for his years of insults, without even knowing they do it.

The poetic irony of this unintentional kanly (and make no mistake that it is kanly, for while the name Kynes is that of no Great House, surely there is no one else that can have claimed to have ruled the fiefdom of Arrakis for the last four decades? By honorarium, then) is altogether lost on him as he lies hallucinating on a dune face, hearing his father's lectures once more.

He comprehends that his father was wrong. About so much, really, about the nature of causality and the persistence of error.

Most surely, however, his father was wrong about his own nature, and the enormity of that error makes him laugh in the blackness of his head as waits for the pre-spice mass to blow. It is utterly plain to see; he has all the biological markers-- the blue-within-blue eyes, the thirst for blood, the cussed Fremen stubbornness.

He is, in the end, a desert creature. And dies as one, his water returning to the tribe, and to the earth of which he has been a steward and a slave.


End file.
